Fitting In
by TanuKyle
Summary: He was always different with his dark skin and large build, and he always wanted to fit in. It was almost ironic how by the time he found someone with the same skin he didn't need them anyway.  Character Drabble


Barratt, even before avalanche, the implant into his smashed arm, had always been different. He didn't think about his childhood much. Growing up in the Slums wasn't something people really liked to remember. But when sorting through his belongings, he finds a photo and cupping it in his huge hands remembers.

Soft hands, the woman he called mother. She stroked his fuzzy hair and helped him stand. His head was still aching and his vision blurry, but he was beginning to understand some of the things she said so as she hooked her slender arms around his body (dark, strong, big even as a child), he smiled for the flash of the camera, the action tugging at the stitches on his scalp.

There's another photo behind it, and another. Photos that first are sharp, in-focus but greyscale, tinted sepia with age, and then eventually they move into colour but they're blurrier now, and fewer have the both of them in, and many have thumbs overlapping the lens.

The man who took photographs was dead. He understood that. He didn't think mother did. She was crying against his chest, sobbing. He had already cried all his tears, and they weren't for the photographer so much as for everyone. She's paler now, paler than usual, her bones stick out. Barratt looks at his arms – thick, strong, dark, one mechanical from the forearm, and then at his mother, who is pale and spindly.

"Why am I so different than you?" 

His tongue is thick on the words. He doesn't want to upset her, and he still struggles with language sometimes – but he has to know. He really, really has to know.

She looks at him with green eyes (so unlike his own), and begins to cry afresh.

One of the photos is unusual. It's a portrait of his mother, but she's not smiling. She's sitting at a window. The portrait is taken from the back but it still looks like sadness – she's fragile against the light.

Barratt ran his hands over the beams of their house. Her house? Was it his house? He'd always thought he'd grown up here – that she knew him before the amnesia, before the stitches. He ran his fingers lightly over the scar on his head.

Apparently he'd turned up half-dead on the doorstep, a bleeding, aching child with a colour of skin that nobody knew. He couldn't remember anything, couldn't talk. (He remembered that.) He'd been nursed back to health by her (He remembered that too) and started to call her mother (It was an obvious assumption – he couldn't see himself to see the differences). She'd never had children (never could – he never knew that), so she took him in. Paid for a doctor (A chop-shop mechanic), to build him a mechanical arm, patch him up. And then the photograph man died and he finally asked.

He cradled the camera in his arms. Cupped it with his brown hand and his silver hand (he said silver but it was more myriad hues and shades of grey than anything else), marvelling at how small, how light, how useful it was.

He went downstairs to tell Mother. Show her what he'd bought. Show her all the different colours it printed, show her that they all worked together, that it didn't matter.

She was at the window, fragile, faded. Barratt snapped a photo on impulse, to show her, then caught the shine of tears on her cheek and crept back upstairs.

He didn't think he ever showed her that photo. Buried it among his belongings when he got the others developed. He continues palming his photos, stopping with a chuckle at one where he's standing (heads above) a group of kids. As he remembers he remembers how they died too and the smile slips from his face.

He's the only kid in the whole slums who's big and dark. Some of the other kids are darker than others, but none like him. Barratt hasn't ever seen someone like him, even size-wise. So he bunches up with a group of other kids-who-don't-quite-fit. A girl who's aggressive, impulsive, who has ginger hair and spots all over (she calls them freckles and punches him in the stomach. She yells and cradles her fist but Barratt's grinning because she tried it like he wasn't any different than the rest). A kid who stands small even when not compared to Barrat, and has huge spectacles on his face (Barratt lifts him up onto his shoulders once and he laughs, causing half the street to turn and look – laughter is rare in the slums). A blonde kid who had a mechanical leg (wasn't the same quality as his but it let him get around pretty good, and they had somebody to go to the mechanic's with when it broke so they didn't get ripped off or something).

He thinks he fits in until the day that a big beam falls from the ceiling and crushes them all. Barratt survives, though he spends a week in bed. Nobody else does. There's nothing from Shinra (who were working there last week, who left the beam loose), not even a word or announcement.

It plants the first seeds.

He flicks through more until he comes to a shot of 7th Heaven. The three of them (Him, Tifa, Marlene) are standing in front and smiling (he can see a pale finger overlapping the lens and he wonders if that's the last shot he has of his Mother.), and they look so different than they do now. There's a little sign, half-obscured in the window of a mountain.

Avalanche was his second attempt to fit in, and it worked better.

There's a photo of a fire, and Barratt stand in front. His arm (the mechanical one) is a pulped mess, but he's grinning anyway, savage like a caged beast (he was for a long time). He almost lost his arm that evening, until on the way home they met a girl in a pink dress who sold flowers and wrapped his arm up, pointing him to a doctor-mechanic (He never found the place again and it's another one of those mysteries surrounding the flower-girl.) who was going to fix it up and told him there weren't enough nerves left to build a hand. He asked for a gun instead because that meant he'd never be caught unawares (because that's why he lost it, wasn't it). The mechanic looks at his pulped arm in a new light, the traces of mako splattered on his jeans, still-glowing, and does the procedure half-price.

There's a few more photos of raids, fires (after that it became dangerous enough to get out with his life, let alone take photos), a few scattered shots of Marlene, and then out of the blue a photo of Yuffie, peering into the lens and looking confused. Then a photo of Cid yelling at her. He realises they must have got their hands on the camera and grins despite himself. After that there's blurry shots of everyone – Him, Tifa, Aeris, Red XIII, even Cloud, a rare shot of him smiling. There's even a picture of Vincent, half-way through cleaning his gun. He notices that some of them have their mouths open to yell, and others look like they don't see anybody at all (He recognises Yuffie's handiwork alright). But he puts them back in the box, laying the ancient camera (so outdated, now) on top, and packs it in the 'keep' box, to be shelved in a house somewhere.

On their last trek outwards (looking for something, anything), they came across a tribe of nomads. Their skin was as dark as Barratt's, darker, almost. He had smiled a rueful smile and raised a hand.

He finally found the people he could have fit in with.

But by then he had what-was-once-Avalanche. He had a group of people who he had almost died with or for, and the memory of one who did die, and half-memories of all the others who died before them.

By then he didn't need a family the same colour as him because he'd found another one already, with a creature who couldn't skulk in the dark because he had fire in him, a man who was the dark and a man who's eyes glowed in it – a pilot who could fix anything and a ninja who could break it. A girl who hit almost as hard as he did, and a daughter who was as much a blood relation as he had been to his mother, a boy about the same and both of them he loved more than anyone who had his blood (he doesn't look at the woman who is big like he is, who has the same shape of nose – maybe she is his mother by blood, but it's too late now.)

They break bread with the nomads and move on.

Baratt pulls Yuffie off Cloud before the other reacts with sharp things, and is glad for his family.


End file.
